As with all of
Dawkins’ books, the writing is impressive.
The Selfish Gene
is colourful, convincing and unforgettable – until one tries
to analyse it by the standard philosophical and scientific
criteria. Then it unravels.

First, it unravels
because there has been confusion over whether the title was
or was not meant to be metaphorical. It is clear that when
it was first written in 1976, and even as late as 1981,
Dawkins’ position was “that was no metaphor. I believe it is
the literal truth”.

I strongly believe
that was indeed the case. It is hard to read
The Selfish Gene
without supposing that its author was intent on conveying
hard and incontestable scientific truth. The book exudes
that kind of confidence in its message. So, why couldn’t it
be ‘the literal truth’? The reason is provided by Dawkins
himself in his 1981 article. He tries to explain why it is
literal truth by explaining that it is a metaphor! The
sentence I quoted above continues “provided certain key
words are deﬁned in the particular ways favoured by
biologists”. A metaphor is precisely ‘certain key words
defined in particular ways’. The whole point of a metaphor
is that the meaning of the word is changed from its normal
literal meaning.

This confusion is
symptomatic of a deeper confusion. As pure metaphor, the
idea suffers from the difficulty that no experiment could
ever distinguish between the selfish gene view and opposing
metaphors, such as co-operative or prisoner genes. In my
2011 article I attempt to find a way out of this problem by
asking whether there are ways of unpacking the metaphor to
give the idea some empirical leverage, so that it could at
least become testable. One way of doing that is to conflate
the terms “selfish” and “successful”. A selfish bit of DNA
is then the one that succeeds in increasing its frequency in
the gene pool. But what this does is to make the hypothesis
empty, circular. The only prediction of the hypothesis, i.
e. success in increasing frequency in the gene pool, is also
the definition of the hypothesis’ central entity. As I say
in my 2011 article “It is a strange hypothesis that uses its
own deﬁnition of its postulated entity as its only
prediction.” Joan Roughgarden has also spotted that
conflating “selfish” and “successful” makes the hypothesis
empty: “But that vacates the meaning of selfish. "Selfish
gene" and "successful gene" are not the same thing.”

We have to live
therefore with the uncomfortable fact that it “is clearly
metaphorical metaphysics, and rather poor metaphysics at
that since, as we have seen, it is essentially empty as a
scientiﬁc hypothesis, at least in physiological science”
(Noble 2011).